Re: stars: Star data catalogues being used cannot be distributed modified and license concers of other data/ files
On Tue, Apr 27, 2004 at 01:09:04AM +0200, Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña wrote:
> Package: stars
> Version: 0.12-7
> Priority: serious
>
> There are several copyright concerns with this package related to the
> data provided under the 'data' directory. There is no reference at all
> in the debian/copyright stating wether that data is DFSG-free or not
> and, as matter of fact, some of the star data catalogues provided (the
> "Yale bright star catalog") are known to be non-free. I believe an
> audit of the DFSG-freeness of all the star data catalogues as well as
> the pictures provided in these package should be done.
>
> I'm currently the maintainer of the 'yale' Debian package, which was
> separated from the starplot package due to copyright concerns. The
> 'COPYING' file in the yale sources (and the debian/copyright file)
> clarify this further:
>
> "My conclusions are that (1) you are free to redistribute the ADC data
> files. However, (2) you must not delete any documentation giving
> credit for the datafiles, for example in the README; and (3) the data
> files must NOT be altered in any way (without permission of the
> original authors). Therefore (4) it is NOT permissible to redistribute
> the *.stars files which the StarPlot conversion program creates from
> the ADC data files. I have confirmed these conclusions with the ADC."
>
> Your package does in fact contain the Yale data in data/yale.cat
> data/yale.def data/yale.des data/yale.info and this qualifies as a
> serious bug. Notice that moving your package to non-free is not an
> option: this modified data cannot be present, even in non-free (the
> 'yale' package provides it unmodified).
Since there's been no response on this issue, and it's a matter of
legality rather than of more mutable release policy, I'm scheduling
stars to be removed from testing.
education-astronomy seems to depend on stars. I'd be grateful if this
dependency could be removed.
Thanks,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
Reply to: